


see through my act

by tokillthatmockingbird



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Child Abuse, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-12 13:15:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 17,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29760192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tokillthatmockingbird/pseuds/tokillthatmockingbird
Summary: What Adam never says is: He has a gun, Ronan.What he never says is: If you try to save my life, I’m probably gonna die.(how the gangsey discovers and deals with robert parrish's evil)
Relationships: Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 39
Kudos: 143





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> trigger warning for non-graphic depictions of abuse of a minor. probably not canon compliant. just an exploration of friends trying to grapple with problems and lies much bigger than they are.
> 
> soundtrack of this series of ficlets is liar by arcadian wild and if that ain't an adam parrish song i'm a duck

More than anything, Adam Parrish didn’t like to make a fuss.

He let his birthdays go by without mention, never talked about his valedictorian-track grades, didn’t tell his anyone when he got a raise at Boyd’s or employee of the month anywhere else. His MO was keeping his head down, nose in a book, hiding in the shadows. He’d been really good at it, too, until Richard Gansey III adopted him.

They asked a lot of questions, his friends. Which apparently is what friends did. Adam hadn’t had many growing up, just loose acquaintances, relationships by proximity. The trailer park was crawling with kids his age, itching to get out of their own miserable homes, but there was never enough in common for them to stick around. And he was equally as bad making friends at school as he was at home, so Adam went into Aglionby fully accepting that he’d be alone until graduation.

They weren’t even that friendly with one another yet— well, perhaps Adam wasn’t too friendly with them, but Gansey treated him like a lifetime chum almost immediately— when Noah leaned over the front seat of the car and said, “What happened to your face, Adam?”

Adam’s first internal response: absolute panic.  
Adam’s second internal response: mind your own business.

Adam’s real response: “Fell off the porch this morning. It was dark. Missed a step.”

It felt like a bad answer, even as he said it, but Noah shrugged and accepted it as at least mostly true before slinking into the back and bothering Ronan with some chatter.

Gansey raised an eyebrow, but his gaze never left the road. “Must have been some fall.”

Adam’s first internal response: absolute panic.

Adam’s second internal response: mind your own business.

Adam’s real response: “Yeah, I guess.”

At school, they parted ways, came back together, separated. Questions rolled away from bruised faces and towards classwork, study guides, questionable cafeteria food. Adam nodded at the right times, shrugged at the right times, offered monosyllables of encouragement when it felt necessary. He never offered enough for a follow-up question, which suited him just fine. He didn’t know how many lame answers he had left before the boys rang his bell.

At the end of the school day, he wrenched his wretched bike from the trunk of the Pig and set off towards Boyd’s. No one asked him about his face, or his family, or his day. Boyd just pressed a set of keys into his hand, mumbled something about an oil change on a Jeep, and later said, “Night, Parrish,” before they both clocked out.

It was Adam’s ideal relationship.

He snuck into the trailer well after dark, managed to scarf down half a serving of whatever slop his mother managed to curate for dinner, and disappeared to his room with a backpack laden with books. No one came to his doorway to wish him good night. No one checked in to see if he had made it home safe. The pulse under his ribs was Adam’s only reminder that he was even alive to acknowledge.

\---------

Adam was good at going under the radar because his very survival necessitated it. There was a razor thin tightrope to walk in the Parrish household. Robert Parrish had a low tolerance for noise and nonsense and any general reminder that he had married and procreated once upon a time. Sometimes, Adam’s presence at the dinner table was enough to draw gruffness from his father.

“You’re a mess,” he’d bark, cutting through the silence. “You show up to your fancy school lookin’ like that?”

Adam didn’t know what _that_ entailed, but he answered dutifully, “No, sir.”

“Just because those people think we’re trash doesn’t mean you gotta look it, Adam. Take a damn shower or something after dinner.”

“Yes, sir.”

Then nothing but the clank of silverware on plates.

\---------

Sometimes, Adam wondered if it had always been like this. He tried to reach back into his memories, bring to the surface a glimpse of happiness, or even just a moment of neutrality in the home. Either he had blacked them out over the years, not letting hope of the Good Old Days get in the way of reality, or there wasn’t any tangible joy to remember. Adam doesn't explore it too much, not sure which answer he wants.

He doesn’t know the first time he got hit, just knows it has always been a threat looming above his head. He knows there are stretches of time that the threat was thin, that Robert’s mood was more or less apathetic to the happenings around him. Adam has gone weeks, months even, without an altercation. It is almost worse then, the lack of consistency, not knowing when the tenuous tranquility would shatter. It is why he had taken on the full-time role of a ghost haunting the doublewide: if something were to trigger Robert’s temper, it wouldn’t be Adam.

Or at least he pretended he had that kind of control.

The grimmer reality was that there was no predicting what would make Robert angry. The things that were tolerable on Wednesday were no longer so on Friday. With no warning, the baseball cap he wore at the table was disrespectful, stuffed into the garbage disposal, shredded until the whole mechanism stopped working, and then someone had to be held responsible for the broken sink.

He remembers when dirt on the floor was a trigger, and even though Alice had softly reminded her husband that his own work boots tracked it in, Adam paid the price. He adopted the habit of taking his shoes off at the door then. Always adapting, like it mattered, like his father’s moods were stable enough to appease by little tweaks of behavior.

It was why Alice stopped standing up for him, Adam convinced himself, because it didn’t matter what she said anyway. They might as well avoid both of them being in trouble.


	2. Chapter 2

“Parrish, are you wearing _make-up_?” Ronan says _make-up_ the way some people would say _snot sandwich_. He reaches out an invasive finger, rubbing at the cakey foundation on Adam’s jaw.

Adam jerks his head away, swats at Ronan’s hand, mumbles something, anything.

Alice had helped him that morning, when the mottled bruise looked vicious enough to raise concern. Her unsteady hand smeared and smeared. Adam had sighed into his reflection, threw on a hooded sweatshirt like it was armor. He is good at keeping his head down.

But his friends are better at being nosy.

“Where’s the mascara?” Noah asks, chewing around a mouthful of peanut butter sandwich. “Go big or go home. If you’re going to wear make-up, you should make it count.”

Adam pulls his hood over his head and leaves the table without a sound. He feels the exchanged glances behind his back as he storms from the cafeteria.

\---------

The make-up was a bad idea; he knew it as soon as Alice suggested it. He should have acted like there was nothing to hide, worn the bruise proudly. His friends were used to their random appearances now and hopefully buying the story that gangly Adam was klutzy as a newborn giraffe. But now that he had attempted a cover-up, he had created something to hide, a secret that his curious friends would want to unbury.

They find him by the bike rack, struggling with a rusted lock.

Maybe he isn’t so good at keeping his head down after all.

“Adam, hold on,” Gansey says. He grips Adam’s handlebars with his unscarred, unworked hands. “Don’t leave. Ronan shouldn’t have— well, I guess I’m not sure what he shouldn’t have done.”

There’s fire in Adam’s eyes as he wrenches his bike from Gansey’s grasp. The other boy puts his hands up, as if in surrender, and steps back. Adam looks like an animal cornered, gaze darting from one Aglionby student to the next as if gauging which one would pounce.

“I just have to go,” he says and then growls a little as his bike lock refuses to give.

“At one in the afternoon?” Ronan asks, snorts even. “What? You’ve got a date in the middle of a school day?”

“Yeah, maybe I do,” Adam snaps back. His bike lock pathetically screeches free, coughing up rust into his hand. Adam stuffs it into his backpack. “Can you move?”

The wall in front of him is not too threatening: one smudgy boy looking like he’d fly away in a gust of wind, one boy in boat shoes with money that has fought all his battles, and well, Ronan, who is by far the scariest with his shaved head and his sharp everything. But Adam isn’t looking for a fight; he’s looking for an _escape_.

“You can cut the bullshit, Parrish,” Ronan finally says, and though his gaze is hard, his voice bares less of an edge. “Maybe we aren’t all super geniuses like you, but we aren’t stupid.”

“What Ronan means to say,” Gansey cuts in smoothly, gently, “is that you don’t have to lie to us.”

Adam’s first internal response: absolute panic.  
Adam’s second internal response: mind your own business.

Adam’s real response: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

And as he searches for an exit, he realizes he has nowhere to go once he leaves, no goal but to leave these boys and their questions and the pity in their eyes behind him.

“We don’t have to talk about it here,” Gansey says with a forceful glance at Ronan, who looks like he’s about to interject with something cutting. “We’re just concerned for you.” _We_. Like this is something they’ve discussed before, in private. Adam hates thinking he’s a topic of anyone’s conversation, especially when he’s not around.

“Well, you don’t have to be concerned,” Adam insists, “because nothing is wrong.” Gansey wears pity like a regal cape. Noah’s eyes are blown so wide, Adam thinks they might explode. Ronan merely chews on the tie of his leather bracelet. He doesn’t bother even making eye contact. “Like, I said, I have to be somewhere, so if you could move—”

“Adam, who’s hurting you?” It comes from Noah, a squeak. “We’re not going to tell anyone, if that’s what you’re worried about. Not unless you want us to.”

Adam’s mouth goes dry, but his hands start to sweat. He struggles to remember how to breathe, despite a brain gone into overdrive. So many thoughts at once that his mind goes blank trying to grasp just one. There are answers at his peripherals, if only he is strong enough to find it.

He’s already in absolute panic.  
He’s already told them, in so many words, to mind their business.

This time he just shrugs.

Which seems to be enough for them. At least for now. Gansey nods and carefully guides the bike back into the rack. He rests a comforting hand on Adam’s shoulder, which makes Adam flinch in surprise. A pulse beats amongst them all, an understanding.

“Come on, Parrish,” Ronan finally breaks the silence. “I need someone to challenge me in Latin class, or I’m not going.”


	3. Chapter 3

The BMW crunches gravel all the way down the street, kicks dust clouds behind them in the dark, sticky night. Without being asked, Ronan turns down the bass-heavy music when they turn the corner. Adam’s long fingers fidget with the strap of his seatbelt. Ronan nearly drives into the grass watching them. 

A few lots down from Adam’s, they see the yellow glow of lights. After pizza at Nino’s and a few laps around the countryside, Adam and Ronan snaked their way through back roads to get to Antiem Road before Adam’s absence becomes palpable, before Alice, as the only target inside, goads Robert’s temper towards their son and away from her. It isn’t early enough for dinner, isn’t late enough for Adam to break whatever unspoken curfew Robert had set, but the sight of shadows behind the curtains hardens a knot in Adam’s throat.

“You know you don’t have to go in,” Ronan says as Adam lingers in the passenger seat. “Gansey doesn’t sleep. You can just have his bed at Monmouth tonight.” 

Adam sighs, unclips his seat belt. “We already know how this goes,” he says wearily. “Can we just skip to the end?” 

The conversation is almost tattooed to their tongues by now. Ronan prodding, Adam dodging and weaving. Claims of safety that they both know can’t be promised. A smattering of four-letter words. Ronan asking questions that Adam himself doesn’t have the answers to. 

“I just don’t get why you let him do this—” Ronan starts, fiery, pissed, just above his baseline fiery and pissed.

“I don’t let him do anything,” Adam interrupts with an edge that shuts The Ronan Lynch up, for a second. “You don’t have a clue what happens in there.” And it’s true, despite knowing trauma and pain, this kind of hurt is entirely outside Ronan’s realm of understanding. Even when he had fucked up, really fucked up, Ronan’s parents had loved him. “Besides, he’s not always as bad as you think—”

Now it’s Ronan’s turn to interrupt. “So what do you think he’s doing awake right now? You think he’s waiting up to tell you a bedtime story?” It strums a string in Ronan’s heart, to remember the lilting stories and lullabies and memories his parents had gifted him, knowing that Adam never had those things. “Come on, Parrish, cut the shit. Tell me right now you don’t think you’re walking into a beating.” The stupid electronic music bumps in the silence between them. “If you can look me in the eye and tell me that, then I’ll leave you right here, right now.”

Adam has lied so many times before, so he’s not sure why he can’t do it this time. Maybe because looking into Ronan Lynch’s blue eyes is a bit like looking into the sun, maybe because as infuriating as Ronan Lynch is, he always tells the truth, and Adam desperately wants to do the same. The truth is, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know if tonight is a lucky one or his last one. 

Instead of lying, he opens the car door. “Night, Lynch.”

“Adam, wait,” Ronan says, all out of anger and now relying on desperation. It stops Adam in his tracks. He wants to say something courageous, kind, helpful. But after searching Adam’s tired face, the bags under his eyes, dullness of his gaze, what he says is, “I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”

Adam doesn’t know what he wanted Ronan to say, just that that wasn’t it. He deflates. “Yeah. See you at school.” 

As Adam crosses the multiple lawns from Ronan’s parking spot to the doublewide’s front door, Ronan pounds his fists on the steering wheel cursing aloud. He does not stop to think as he throws his car into gear and speeds out of the trailer park, wheels spinning on loose gravel. He bumps the volume of the radio to block out every thought he has and drives into the night.


	4. Chapter 4

“What kind of person doesn’t have a cell phone nowadays?” Gansey asks, no venom and all worry. He paces in circles by the bike rack. Ronan sits a top Pig’s hood, chewing on a bracelet thread. Noah is barely there, somehow, his own nerves pulling him into pieces. “Even my grandma has a flip phone.”

“Dick, you’re going to put a hole in the parking lot with all that pacing,” Ronan says coolly, as if his own heart isn’t threatening to jump out of his chest.

Adam is late for school. Adam has never been late for school. He had called Gansey from his landline, saying he’d picked up a morning shift at Boyd’s and didn’t need a ride. Promised to meet the gang before first bell to go over some Glendower shit that all seemed irrelevant now.

“And you’re sure he didn’t call you?” Gansey asks. He checks his own phone again, to make sure the last thirty times he’d been mistaken. Ronan shakes his head. “He said he’d be here.”

“He’s probably running late or something,” Ronan offers, hopping off the car. He puts his hands on Gansey’s shoulders, stops the pacing. “Come on. We’re going to be late waiting for him.” Ronan had never given one shit about being on time or present for a single one of his classes, but it feels better to have a destination other than the empty bike rack.

Gansey takes one last look, as if to make sure he hadn’t missed Adam’s bike in the rack, and then turns towards school. Calculus had never felt less important.

\---------

While Ronan normally drives twenty over the speed limit, today is an exception. He’s going at _least_ thirty over as he follows the familiar route to the trailer park. Gansey had a phone call with someone probably twenty years older about some artifact, some story, some map, that he can’t miss but wants to. Ronan goes alone.

He realizes as he rolls to a stop that he has no clue what he is going to say. Leap first, think later only works when it’s his own neck on the line. With Adam on the other end of the chopping block, he scrambles about his car, pulls out an old history textbook and a crumpled notebook from under his seat. Then he makes his way up the creaking front steps.

He knocks on the door, waits. Has his hand up to knock again when it swings open, leaving just a holey screen between himself and Alice Parrish. She has Adam’s eyes and freckles. She hugs the door, exposing half of herself to Ronan. “Can I help you?” She sounds exasperated.

“Yeah, uh, I’m dropping off some homework for Par—Adam. Is he home?” He lamely holds up the random books as proof.

The tension is Alice’s shoulders is taut and unforgiving. “He’s home, but he’s sleeping. I think he caught some stomach bug at school. I’ll take those and tell him you came by…” Her voice trails off, indicating a fill-in-the-blank.

“Niall,” Ronan says, a half-lie. He’s nothing if not his father’s son. “I didn’t know he was sick,” he presses. “He called last night, saying he was going to work in the morning.”

“Oh, yeah, poor thing made it halfway to the factory before he started pukin’,” Alice explains. “His dad picked him up and brought him home. We thought it was best he stay here until he feels better.”

Ronan nods. His mind is filled with a static buzz, nothing resembling a coherent thought. “Yeah, uh, that’s probably a good idea. Okay, well, tell him I stopped by,” he says, backing off the porch.

“Niall, the homework?” Alice asks. She steps out from behind the door to receive them.

“Right, right.” He stuffs the books in her hands more forcefully than he intends to and starts back towards his car. His phone is already out of his pocket, dialing before he even gets to the driver’s seat.

Gansey picks up on the first ring. “Did you see him? Is he all right?”

“Did Parrish say he was going to Boyd’s this morning?”

“Yeah,” Gansey says. “He said he had a shift before school.”

He ducks inside the car and peels off from the neighborhood, dashboard dinging to remind him about his seat belt. He ignores it. “Fucker lied to us.” Though Adam had only spoken to Gansey, Ronan is always part of the equation. And he hates lying.

“How do you know?”

_Poor thing made it halfway to the factory before pukin’._

“Even Adam Parrish can’t be two places at once.”

\---------

Gansey is calling Boyd’s and the factory, charming his way into evidence of Adam’s shift that morning. Noah is hanging around Monmouth, in case Adam miraculously shows up, unscathed. Ronan drives like a maniac through the countryside, never more than a few miles from Antiem Road. The sun is starting to set when his phone rings.

“I called Boyd’s first,” Gansey says hurriedly. “They said Adam didn’t even have a shift this morning.” Ronan’s jaw clenches. “So I thought maybe I misheard him or… I don’t know. I called the factory, and they said Adam wasn’t due in until tonight, that he’d called out sick this afternoon.”

Ronan doesn’t have the words to express what he is feeling.

“This is bad, isn’t it, Lynch?” Gansey asks, voice small. “Should I call the cops? I feel like—”

“No,” Ronan insists. It seems logical, to call the authorities, but Ronan knows this situation defies logic. He also knows that sirens and prodding could make things ultimately worse for Adam, as if it could get worse than this. “No, I’ll go check on him again. I’ll just… I’ll sneak around back. See if I can find his bedroom.”

“Ronan, don’t do something stupid,” Gansey warns.

“I won’t.”

“I mean it. If you muck this up, it’s Adam’s problem—”

“I _know_ ,” Ronan growls. “I know. I’m not going to fuck it up. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t fuck up _everything_ I touch.”

A short silence. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

“I know, I know.” He pinches the bridge of his nose, takes a deep inhale. “I’ll be careful, I promise.”

He hangs up, discards his phone into the seat beside him. He revs the engine and shoots off towards the trailer park for the second time that day. When he arrives, Ronan doesn’t know how far too park. Will Adam be able to walk to his car? Will Adam _want_ to walk to his car? If he’s too close, will Robert notice? He settles on hiding the BMW behind some shoddy carport, swearing to any God that was listening that he’d never go to church again if the thing collapsed onto his vehicle.

Having glimpsed half a living room and kitchenette through the crack that Alice had left in the door that afternoon, Ronan ducks around the back of the trailer, praying that was the location of the bedrooms. It is dark out, inky navy blue and thick, Virginia air. Crickets chirp somewhere in the grass. Every step on the crunching gravel feels like it echoes into infinity. A breeze hisses over his sweating skin, and Ronan follows it to an open window. He stands on his toes to see inside.

It is dark, but by thin slivers of moonlight, he can make out a few pieces of the room. A formless backpack sits open-mouthed on the floor. Textbooks are lined carefully against the wall. There is no bedframe, just a mattress on the floor. There is no dresser, just a wire shelving unit with neatly folded clothes in stacks. On the bed is a single occupant. Ronan has never really tried to picture Adam’s bedroom, but this both fits and defies any idea he’d ever had about it.

“Parrish,” he hisses into the open window. “Parrish, it’s me.”

He worries he’ll have to start chucking gravel inside to get Adam’s attention, but he watches Adam lurch to a sitting position. “ _Fuck_ ,” he barks to no one in particular. Or at least, Ronan hopes he isn’t talking to Ronan. Ronan hears heavy panting, awkward lumbering.

Adam’s face appears in the window. “Lynch?” he whispers. “What are you _doing_ here?” He slides open the window to its full extent, carefully, carefully, carefully. The moonlight catches fully on Adam’s form, and he looks… fine.

Ronan blinks in astonishment. He came fully braced to see a face full of bruises and lesions, a fat lip, a black eye. Something noticeable and dark and angry. Maybe it’s just a trick of the light, or maybe Ronan’s hopes are clouding his vision, but Adam’s face is freckled and lined with exhaustion. Nothing else.

“Ronan,” Adam barks. “ _What. Are. You. Doing here?_ ”

“You didn’t come to school,” Ronan says stupidly.

“Okay, did you alert the media?” Adam asks. “Breaking headline: high schooler stays home sick from school.”

“You don’t sound sick.”

“It was probably just something I ate. I’m better now.”

Of all the dreadful scenarios that had filled his head, Ronan should be happy that this is the reality, that the Parrishes are being honest for once, that Adam is _okay_. But even seeing it with his own eyes, Ronan doesn’t believe it.

“Did you come all this way to stupidly stare at me?”

“Fuck you, I’m not stupid,” Ronan says, immediate. He pauses, again, assesses, again. He comes up empty. “You’re really okay?”

Adam rolls his eyes. “Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

“You know why.” Suddenly Adam’s gaze doesn’t meet his. Ronan doesn’t break his line of sight.

“Yeah, well,” Adam’s fingers drum on the windowsill. “I told you, it’s not always as bad as you think—”

“Your hands are bleeding.”

“What?”

“Your hands. They’re bleeding.” Ronan steps forward and catches one before Adam can withdraw. The knuckles are red and angry. The hands Ronan often admired out of the corner of his eye were swollen, bloody, bruised. Adam winces and pulls himself back. “Did you hit him back?” There is a hint of pride in Ronan’s voice, and as the question goes unanswered, his brows knit. “Did you start the fight?”

All Adam does is sigh. He fucking loves to sigh. Ronan hates it.

Then he sees it. A flash. Something shadowy and threatening on the column of Adam’s throat, where his shoulder meets his neck, where Ronan has envisioned burying his face a million times before. Without any conscious agency, Ronan is clambering through the window.

“Ronan, are you _crazy_?” Adam hisses. “If you wake up my parents, they’ll—”

Ronan pauses, half of his body hanging inside the trailer, half of his body out. “They’ll what?” he asks. “If I wake up your parents, they’ll what?”

Adam merely steps back and doesn’t impeded Ronan’s process. He is careful to be as quiet as possible, despite how small the window is and how far it is from the ground. He flops gracelessly onto the mattress and then draws to his full, threatening height. There is nothing but six inches of dead air between them. Adam isn’t breathing. When Ronan reaches out, Adam flinches. Slowly, slowly, Ronan reaches for the collar of Adam’s formless gray tee shirt and pulls. Air hisses between Adam’s teeth.

“What the _fuck_?”

The further Ronan manipulates the collar, the more horror he sees. Rainbows of bruises cover Adam’s chest from his shoulders to his stomach. From here, Ronan can see how ragged his friend’s breathing is.

“It looks worse than it is,” Adam murmurs after a full minute of silence.

Ronan releases his hold of the cotton shirt and immediately scoops all of Adam’s neatly folded shirts into the maw of his backpack.

“What are you doing?” Adam sounds hopeless, helpless, as he watches a rabid Ronan pace about his bedroom, stuffing items from balls of old notebook paper to dress shoes into the bag.

“I’m getting you the fuck out of here. What the fuck else would I be doing?” Ronan sneers, stopping only for a moment to look at Adam as if he had lost his damn mind. “There’s not a chance in hell you’re going to stay here for another _second_. Not like that. Not with him.”

“Ronan, this is pointless, and you know it,” Adam whispers. Ronan picks up an old water bottle and blindly attempts to shove it inside the backpack, despite the fact that it is quite literally bursting at the seams. “Where am I gonna go? He’s gonna come after me. I’m under-aged, and—”

“So _what_?” Ronan tosses the bag down, and it is so heavy with random items that it _thuds_ onto the floor. The house shakes. Adam’s eyes go wide. They wait, wait, wait. When Robert’s snores are finally heard on the other side of the wall, Ronan lets out a breath and hisses. “You’re just going to stay here forever? You want me just to sit here, go about my day, waiting for the phone call from the fucking _coroner_ that he killed you? That you’re _dead_?” The word _too_ goes unvoiced, but Adam feels it thrumming like a guilty heartbeat. Ronan has seen too much death. He has felt too much pain. “I’m not doing it anymore, Parrish. We’re packing you a bag, and we’re getting you the fuck out of here.”

His movements are fervent, wild, uncontrolled. He punctuates each sentence with smatterings of curse words, his breathing is too fast, and he doesn’t realize how frantic he is until one of Adam’s calm, rough hands takes his.

“Ronan. Sit down for a second.”

“I’m not—”

“ _Sit._ ”

It’s more that his knees buckle than he listens to Adam’s command. Ronan sinks onto the lumpy mattress. Adam joins him, sitting in slow motion. Ronan waits for Adam to say something, anything, but the silence stretches into what feels like hours, though it’s probably only tens of seconds. Ronan’s breathing is almost back to normal, and as his eyes adjust to the dimness of Adam’s room, he can see that he’s left it in complete disarray.

“If it would work, I’d go,” Adam says. Ronan doesn’t realize until now that Adam’s hand rests on his thigh, like an anchor to a place when he wants to float away. “I don’t want this. Nobody _wants_ this. But running away… it’s only gonna cause more trouble.”

“We can _help_ , Parrish,” Ronan pleads. “You can live at Monmouth. I’ll… I’ll come to every shift with you, even the early ones. Make sure he leaves you alone. You’ve always got one of us at school to keep you safe.”

Adam laughs, a wry, sad thing. It breaks Ronan’s heart. “You think Noah can take my dad?”

“This isn’t _funny_ , Parrish.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Why won’t you let us help you?” Ronan is ashamed of his flaring temper, of the way that his helplessness triggers anger at a friend who so desperately needs to escape it.

“I think of how to ask you guys. Nearly every day,” Adam admits. “But every scenario ends with one of you getting hurt. It’s not worth it, Lynch. Not to me.”

“But I’ll do it,” Ronan says. He hates how desperate he sounds, how he has crossed the line into begging. He has never begged before, especially not begged someone to save their own life. “I’ll take a punch so you don’t have to.”

“That’s not how it works,” Adam says. “We’d both take the punch. And I don’t want your blood on my hands.”

“Then call the police!” Ronan insists. Adam’s gaze wrenches to the door, waiting to see if it flies open with an angry father on the other side. Ronan lowers his voice again. “There’s clearly enough evidence, right there, to get him thrown in jail. At _least_ get a restraining order.” _At least have him thrown to the pits of hell_ , Ronan wants to say but doesn’t. “I’ll pay for the lawyers.” He knows this is the wrong thing to say as soon as he says it; under everyday circumstances, Adam doesn’t want his money. He certainly doesn’t want it now.

“It’s not about the money!” And then Adam has to pause to corral his voice into a whisper. “I… I’m not ready to be an orphan, man. I’m just not.”

It’s about the only thing he said the whole night that made sense to Ronan.

Alice Parrish would disappear with her husband. She had never once chosen Adam over herself, and she wouldn’t start now. And it would hurt that much more, knowing that while Robert was torn away by the long arm of the law, Alice would _choose_ to abandon Adam. Not for anything worthwhile— just because she didn’t want to choose him. Because, to her, he was not worth choosing.

It was easier to not give her the choice. It was easier if Adam was the one to leave. And that wouldn’t happen until he had an acceptance letter and scholarship in hand. He was stuck until someone else found him worthy of choosing.

“This fucking sucks,” Ronan says.

“This fucking sucks,” Adam agrees.

“You don’t deserve this.”

“Probably not.”

“I could kill him.”

“Is that a threat or a wish list?” Adam asks, jostling shoulders with Ronan. Neither of them feel like laughing. Adam coughs. It hurts.

“Do you have anything for the pain? Ibuprofen or…?”

Adam nods at the little white bottle on the floor by his mattress. It’s one of the only things Ronan hadn’t managed to squeeze into the backpack. Beside the pill bottle is a lumpy bag of what used to be frozen peas. In the Henrietta heat, they have softened, congealed.

“Fuck. _Fuck_.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “Are you coming to school tomorrow, at least? So I know you didn’t die in your sleep?”

Adam pulls a face as he shifts, but he says, “Sure. I can come to school.”

“Walk your bike to the corner. I’ll pick you up,” Ronan demands. “Don’t go any further than that corner, or I’m gonna find your collapsed dead some where, and then I’ll have to do some magical fuckery to bring you back and kill you again.”

“Okay.”

Adam’s compliance is almost as annoying as his stubbornness. Ronan swears under his breath and heads towards the window.

“I’m gonna leave now,” he says. “But I’ll be back tomorrow morning. At the corner.” Adam nods, his breathing slow and ragged. Ronan swallows. “Night, Adam.”

“Night, Ronan.”

What Adam never says is _He has a gun, Ronan_.

What he never says is _If you try to save my life, I’m probably gonna die._


	5. Chapter 5

As promised, Adam comes to school the next day.

He meets Ronan on the corner, ignoring the wrinkles in the other boy’s uniform, the creases in his face, the bags under his eyes. He does not ask how Ronan slept; it seems pointless. Likewise, Ronan doesn’t ask about Adam’s sleep because he can see it on his face.It

Ronan slept in the BMW, hidden behind the crappy carport. He woke with the sun and looped around the neighborhood to shake the previous night’s weight from his shoulders. The boots heavy on the accelerator have a sheen of dust from the gravel around Adam’s yard. Besides the hum of the engine, the car is silent.

Gansey and Noah meet them in the parking lot. Adam does not bother to pretend they do not know. He saw the screen of Ronan’s phone light up dozens of time on the ride into town. DICK HEAD DICK HEAD DICK HEAD, it showed. Adam correctly assumes that DICK HEAD is Gansey’s contact name and that Ronan has shared every detail he has about Adam’s injuries. He did not share how much it scared him.

It wasn’t a lie. It was an omission.

“Morning,” Gansey says brightly, though the lines of worry around his eyes do not reflect his tone. He grips a to-go coffee so tightly it crunches slightly in his hands. Noah yawns widely, waves in greeting. Adam merely nods.

“I’ve said it before,” Ronan says, slamming his car door like it personally offended him, “and I’ll say it again: we should skip today.”

“I’ve said it before,” Gansey repeats, “no.”

Adam looks like he doesn’t think it’s a half-bad idea. He also looks queasy. They split for first period. Gansey shakes the urge to follow Adam to his chemistry class, despite the fact that they didn’t share it. Noah’s mood is so down that he merely blends in with the crowd in the halls. Ronan looks particularly surly and does not bother to collect any belongings before he goes to take a nap in history.

Third period is PE.

\------------

Besides hating just about everything associated with school, Ronan hates the locker rooms the most. It’s loud and full of men in various states of undress who yell about _homos_ when you so much as glance in their direction, never mind the fact that they’re the ones lolling about mostly naked at ten in the morning.

He hates the showers because they smell like bleach, and there is not one single temperature on the dial that is suitable for human skin. He hates that he has to memorize another locker combination, would rather risk having his gym clothes stolen than even attempt to try.

But he knows one person who hates it more than him.

Adam Parrish is still absent by the time Ronan has changed from one crumpled uniform to the other. Adam Parrish is still absent when Gansey has changed as well. They exchange glances, lingering as long as possible before they lope into the gymnasium where Coach Wickersham and his crusty mustache are already barking at the assembled group of boys.

“It’s dodge ball day, boys,” he announces. Multiple whoops and hollers go up amongst the more competitive members of the class. “You know how this goes. No injuries. I’m sick of the paperwork.”

Ronan takes it back. He hates dodge ball far more than he hates the locker room.

The doors of the gym clatter open, and Adam enters to the entirety of third period PE staring.

“Glad you could join us, Parrish,” Wickersham booms. Adam’s ears are pink when he makes it to the group, his backpack slung over one shoulder. Gansey elbows Ronan, a physical communication. Ronan already notices. Adam is the only one in the group in the winter uniform— long sleeves and sweatpants. He slides his hands into the sleeves until only the tips of his fingers poke out, masking each cracked knuckle. Ronan’s stomach rolls.

Coach picks two captains who are miraculously two members of his lacrosse team. As they break into teams, Gansey lowers his voice. “I thought you said it was just his chest.”

“It _was_ ,” Ronan hisses.

Dodge ball is every bit as terrible as Ronan thinks it is going to be and worse. It’s a stupid premise to begin with, made worse by the student athletes who act as though they are Spartans gone to war, their weapons of choice rubber balls and their targets wimpy high schoolers. Ronan doesn’t lack athleticism, but he is so apathetic about the event that he allows himself to be hit nearly immediately.

Gansey _does_ lack the brand of athleticism dodge ball requires, so he joins Ronan courtside only a few moments later.

Adam looks like he is going to fall over just standing on his feet. When Kavinsky releases a dodge ball that his him square in the gut, he goes to the ground.

“Hey!” Ronan growls, loudly. “Coach!” It takes a few long, agonizing seconds before the whistle blows.

“Get up, Parrish,” Wickersham calls lazily. Kavinsky and his friends are bumping fists, laughing, holding balls on their hips. Gansey is breaking across the court to loop an arm under Adam’s. Ronan sees red.

“Get up, pussy!” Kavinsky calls, and a smattering of cackles bursts out behind him.

“Hey, none of that,” Wickersham says, though it sounds like he says it because someone wants him to, not because he means it.

Adam stands as Atlas, the weight of the entire world on his back, pushing him back towards the ground. When Gansey grips his forearms to keep him steady on shaking legs, one of the sleeves is moist. His eyes blow wide with worry. “Parrish, why don’t you tell Coach you have to go to the nurse?”

Adam merely shakes his head. “ ‘M fine,” he mumbles, though he has gone considerably paler under his freckles.

“What the _fu—_?”

Gansey whips around to see Ronan Lynch tackling Joseph Kavinsky to the floor. A whole scramble breaks out, yelling, swearing. The coach blows his whistle to add to the cacophony. Eventually, he pulls Ronan out of the fray by the collar of his shirt. Kavinsky or one of his goons landed a solid right hook to Ronan’s face. His lip is already swelling.

“You think you’ve got a big dick, huh?!” Ronan is screaming as the Coach wrestles him back.

“Ronan!” Gansey barks.

The fight leaves him. Coach Wickersham shoves him towards the exit. “Go to the principal’s office, Lynch.” Ronan leaves a gymnasium so silent that his shoes make the only noise as he squeaks to his behavioral probation. The coach converses with Kavinsky a few moments before he turns to Gansey and Adam. “You good, Parrish?” he asks, though his tone says he won’t bother to listen for the answer.

Gansey wants Adam to say no, he’s not good, in fact he’s very _bad_ and would like to go home please, but instead Adam says, “I’m good,” in a voice that doesn’t even sound _marginally okay,_ nonetheless _good._

Gansey sighs, draws his mouth open to admonish Adam, and then says, “He’s bleeding, Coach!”

Adam looks confused and betrayed, but when he looks down, he sees red smeared in the lines of his palms. Small droplets of blood splatter at his feet. Before Gansey can even comment further, Adam says, “I’ll go to the nurse.” He turns on his heel and rushes out behind Ronan before the coach can even approve.

\---------

If Ronan did not have thousands of frequent flier miles to the principal’s office, no secretary would know to allow Declan in to talk suspension, to talk academic probation, to talk problem problem problem. As it is, he’s called up to the school after the dodge ball brawl.

Ronan sits on a seat outside the closed door, pressing an ice pack to his lip. He hears the familiar, always-appropriate cadence of his brother but can’t make out any words. It doesn’t matter anyway. It is probably better if he’s suspended. He _does_ hear, “Thank you, Dr. Pendleton,” before the door opens and reveals Declan Lynch in a suit that looks like an adult’s with a face that does not. It’s very clear he is beyond his scope parenting at all, nonetheless parenting a hell-beast like Ronan Niall Lynch.

Wordlessly, Ronan knows to follow. The doors of Aglionby are barely shut behind them when Declan turns on his younger brother with a fire that betrays the utter dullness of the rest of him. “You _punched_ a kid, Ronan? Really?” he snaps. “ _Why_? Why would you do that?”

“If you saw how punchable his face was, you’d probably do it too,” Ronan grumbles, though the heat of embarrassment rises to his cheeks. He is not embarrassed about hitting Kavinksy; he’d do it again if he had the chance. He just does not care to get chastised by his brother on school property.

“Cut the bullshit, Ronan. Do you realize what this is doing to your chances of staying here?” Declan asks. Ronan’s mouth is barely drawn open when Declan interrupts, “I know you don’t care, but can you at least _pretend_ to? Can you at least _try_ to make _something_ easy for me?”

Ronan scans his brother top to bottom and realizes that while Declan doesn’t have an adult face, he does have an adult’s eyes, old and tired. It properly sobers the angry monster that has been scratching at the insides of Ronan’s chest since he watched Adam collapse in gym class.

“You’ve got in-school suspension for the rest of the week,” Declan sighs. Ronan hears the beep-beep of his brother’s Volvo unlocking from the visitor parking spot. “You’ll have time to catch up on all the assignments you haven’t turned in.” He steps off the curb. Ronan once again knows to follow. Over the top of the car, Declan adds, “And you’ll have time to write an apology to Joseph Kavinsky.”

“Oh, _fuck_ that!” Ronan exclaims.

Declan raises a hand to stop any dispute. “I don’t care if you mean it. You’re writing it. It’s going to sound so full of shame that a Catholic would blush. And you’re going to hand deliver it to him. It’s the end of the discussion.”

It _is_ the end of the discussion because Ronan decides he will never talk to Declan again for accepting that deal.

“Drive yourself home,” Declan says. “I have to get back to class.”


	6. Chapter 6

Gansey goes to the nurse’s office during his break. He charms the study hall monitor with a smile and some story that doesn’t even have to make sense, not when you’re Richard Gansey III. He winds his way through the halls blindly, mind preoccupied with the way the water in the sink turned red when he washed his hands, how Adam’s blood had caked under his nails.

Politely, he knocks on the door, puts on his Gansey-est smile. “Hello, Nurse Chen.”

  
“How are you, Richard? Headache?” the kindly nurse asks. There had been a period in his freshman year where his insomnia had gotten the better of him, where splitting migraines sent him to Nurse Chen nearly five times a week. They stopped some time after Noah moved into Monmouth.

“No, ma’am,” Gansey says. “I’m just looking for something of my friend’s. Adam Parrish. He’s missing his sweater and says maybe he left it here.”

He doesn’t even know if Adam wore a sweater to school today, though he must have, to hide bloodied arms from everyone.

“Huh,” Nurse Chen muses. She glances around her small office. “Doesn’t look like it. Sorry, Richard.”

Gansey nods and hesitates in the doorway. He scrambles for a question, a comment, a way to prolong his stay, a way to get a very professional nurse to make a HIPPA violation. And although it seems his luck has run out, some God he doesn’t believe in— maybe Ronan’s— smiles on him. Nurse Chen is the one to extend the olive branch.

“Poor thing, how is he?” she asks. She sets aside a pen, pushes some paperwork aside. “Is he back already?” She shakes her head. “He should be taking it easy. I told him the school would be here if he went home to rest.”

Gansey twists his face into what he hopes looks like placidity, to mask the confusion. “Well, that’s Adam for you. Never takes a day off.”

“Clearly not,” Nurse Chen says with laughter on her voice. Gansey’s gut twists with guilt; she is so kind, and he doesn’t mean to trick her into this conversation. Though it is not enough to make him admit the truth. “I could barely convince him to call his parents to come get him.” She shakes her head. “He was going to ride his bicycle to the hospital. Imagine. Just so he could be back in time for a Latin quiz.”

Gansey does something very un-Gansey-like and kind of loses his cool. “Hospital?” he asks.

Nurse Chen’s eyes narrow. “Well, yes. I can’t do stitches here at school.”

Something in his chest flutters wildly, but Gansey slips a smile back on his face. “No, of course not,” he says lightly, though he almost feels out of breath. He can sense that the nurse is about to ask him a question, so he quickly says, “Well, if I can’t get that sweater, maybe I can have one of the suckers? For the road?”

Her worried expression melts into a smile. “Of course, Richard. Take any flavor you’d like.”

Gansey grabs a lollipop—grape, he thinks— and makes a show of popping it in his mouth. “Thanks, Nurse Chen. I’d better get back to study hall before they send out a search party.”

He sends a text before he makes it even halfway down the hallway. He prays that Ronan has his phone on him, for once.

  
_Go to Adam’s_

The reply is almost immediate.

_On my way_

\---------

Maybe Declan’s understanding had been that Ronan had been properly upbraided and would go back to Monmouth to dutifully do some school work or pray or volunteer for a homeless shelter, but Ronan turns left instead of right at the end of the road and ends up circling the mountains going umpteen miles an hour. He doesn’t have to check his speedometer to know that he’s over the legal limit.

Over the pounding of a particularly bad EDM band, he cannot hear the ding of his phone, but he feels the buzzing against his thigh. He lets up on the accelerator to check the message, and he’s off for Antiem Road before he even responds.

Gansey texts exactly what Ronan should worry about in paragraph form, which he reads while driving breakneck speed, tempting the familiar Henrietta roads to kill him. He almost misses a familiar truck bumbling out of the road to the trailer park. He almost misses a glimpse of Robert Parrish as he spits out the window of the cab. Ronan’s hand white-knuckles the clutch, and it takes every fiber of his being not to crash the BMW at 200 miles per hour into the front of that truck.

He grinds to a stop next to the carport and half-walks, half-jogs to Adam’s porch. He knocks, hard, on the rickety front door. “Parrish?” Ronan shouts. “I know you’re in there. Open the door.” He bangs again. “I’ll open it myself if you don’t.” It would be easy. Even locked, the door rattles in its frame, seems one strong gale of wind from rusting out the hinges, one hard knock from splintering under Ronan’s fist.

The door doesn’t open, but he stops knocking long enough to hear a voice on the other side.

“Ronan?”

“No, it’s the Tooth Fairy,” Ronan snaps. “Open up. I’m here to steal your incisors.”  
  


“Ronan, go home,” Adam sighs.

“I’m not kidding. I’ll break the door down,” Ronan warns, but they both know that he won’t, both know that he will not risk endangering Adam that way. There is a tense moment of silence. Ronan’s hand grips the doorknob, but it twists without his trying.

Adam stands before him.

The silence gets tenser.   
  
“Get it over with,” he sighs.

Ronan’s eyes blaze with fire, but when he reaches out his hand and grabs Adam’s chin, his hands are impossibly gentle. “What the _fuck_.” Adam’s left eye is swollen shut. If Ronan had eaten a meal in the last twelve hours, he might have thrown it up.

“Fell over,” Adam says dully, stepping back from Ronan’s grasp.

Before he can go too far, Ronan grabs Adam’s wrist and pushes the sleeve to the crook of his elbow. This one is smattered with small cuts of various depths and sizes. They are angry and red and jagged but look clean, antiseptic. The push of the other sleeve slowly reveals a thick white bandage, medical-taped onto his forearm.

“Fell twice.”

Ronan is shaking. “ _Christ_ ,” he swears. “Fucking _Christ_ , Parrish!” Adam shushes him, looks over his shoulders to see if the neighbors have been roused. They stay safely tucked behind their doors, as usual. It is not all that surprising: there have been much louder, much more violent commotions at the Parrish trailer, and no one has checked in on them before. “Fucking Christ.”

“He’s pretty famously a virgin, actually,” Adam says. It might be funny under other circumstances. “Listen, I know what you’re going to say. It’s, uh… it’s been a pretty bad twenty-four hours, all right? I know that.”

“I’d say.” Ronan’s voice is so thin a feather fall could shatter it.

He waits for an explanation or an excuse. One does not come.

“You’re gonna die here, Parrish,” Ronan finally says. “You’re gonna die here if you don’t get the hell out.” Adam sighs, and Ronan thinks he might launch himself from the top of Aglionby Prep if he ever hears that sigh again. “I’m serious, Adam! Look at you! I’ve seen boxers come out of the ring looking better than you do.” He realizes in the silence stretching between them that he is still holding onto Adam’s wrists. He relishes in the pulse there. Hates that he has imagined holding those very hands so many times and that the reality is less like the dream and more like a night terror.

Ronan hates lying. He feels a hundred years old under the weight of all these secrets. But no matter how old he feels, it’s never old enough for this. Ronan Lynch, know-it-all and know-nothing. The desperation hits him like hunger.

“It was an accident,” Adam says. “I mean, yeah, he shoved me, but I lost my balance. And went off the porch.” Ronan almost points out that the stitches are on the pale underside of his arms, where blue veins make maps up his wrists. Almost points out that Robert Parrish, like a coward, pushed his son when his back was turned and sent him into a yard of gravel. But he knows it is pointless to say; it’s not as though Adam doesn’t know. It makes Ronan’s insides twist uncomfortably. He had waited too far away this morning or took too long a walk to clear his head. He hadn’t heard or seen one sign of this fight. How much more had he missed?

“And that?” Ronan asks, releasing Adam’s wrists and pointing to the eye that was slowly disappearing behind a swollen bruise. “Was that an accident too?” Adam’s jaw twitches, but he says nothing. Ronan’s voice almost comes out in a whisper. “Can we tell someone now? Please.”

“No.”

“Adam, I—”

“Ronan, I can’t. You know I can’t,” Adam says, exasperated.

“Why _not_?” Ronan demands. He knows how Adam feels about losing his parents, but as the resident expert at losing parents, Ronan thinks it would be better than having the ones that Adam has. And it’s not like Adam needs their help, financially, emotionally. He pays his own way in life and takes care of himself. The way Ronan sees it is that Robert and Alice Parrish are useless to the world except for what their reproductive bits had to offer, and since Adam is fully here and fully grown, the parents Parrish’s usefulness had fully expired.

“Because it’s _embarrassing_ , okay?” Adam snaps. “Because I don’t want to go tell everyone in town that my own parents think so little of me that _this_ is how they treat me!” Ronan blinks in surprise at the outburst, at the answer. “And you could never fucking understand it because your parents _loved_ you. Even at your fucking worst, your parents loved you, and at my _best_ , my parents… don’t beat me.”

Ronan looks away when he notices a sheen of tears in Adam’s one good eye, looks away because he feels like he’s staring at a sun about to burn out.

“And it’s not like people don’t already know. _Everyone_ knows, Ronan. Every damn person in this neighborhood knows what happens.” His chest is heaving with the strain of keeping the tears at bay. “They just don’t _care_.”

The idea that others know, that adults are failing Adam right and left, makes Ronan angry, makes him mean. “Okay, well, the people here are fucking white trash—”

“So am I.” Adam’s voice is even but just barely.

“Okay, Adam, right now isn’t the time to be sensitive about this shit.”

“No, because that’s what you’re not getting. We’re _all_ trash out here. But I’m the only trash getting beat.”

Ronan’s been put in his place so mightily and so many times through the course of this conversation that he thinks he might just grow roots there. His mouth gapes open and closed like a fish out of water. Adam’s gaze snaps towards the rolling of tires over gravel, long off in the distance. Ronan’s gaze follows.

“My dad’s back,” he says urgently. The look on his face is worse than caged prey. Ronan can barely stand to look at it. “You gotta get out of here, Ronan.”

“Yeah. Uh, yeah. I’m going.”

The front door to the trailer is shut with Adam behind it before Ronan can even finish talking. Swearing, he takes off around the back of the trailer, winding through scrubbed plots of grass before he comes to his car. He doesn’t let himself think as he pulls out to the main road. He knows if he starts thinking, it will be the end of him. If he starts thinking, what he does might make the end of Adam.

He drives home.

The world keeps spinning, as it’s prone to do. Adam skips school the rest of the week, and when he comes back on Monday, he’s wearing his mother’s cakey make-up. Ronan, Gansey, and Noah know better than to ask. And then they move on.

Days, weeks pass. They take tests and look for Glendower and eat at Nino’s and Ronan starts dreaming things into reality in the middle of the night, so Adam Parrish and his woes take a back seat. With every passing day that he comes to school without bruises and blood, it gets easier to pretend it never happened in the first place. Ronan gets to be the forefront of everyone’s worry. He hates it but likes that it can happen, likes that their anxiety about Adam doesn’t need to be as frequent.

Maybe Adam had been right. Maybe it had just been a really bad twenty-four hours.

It’s a pleasant daydream to give into, at least.

The only dream Ronan couldn’t bring back from his sleep.


	7. Chapter 7

After a while, the magic’s latency leaves Ronan longing and bored. He does not know how dreams manifest in his hands, does not know how energy living under the very ground where he was raised has hidden itself for so long, does not know how to coax it out into anything more productive than the birdbrains that tried to kill him.

He hadn’t wanted to die, honestly. If he had wanted to die, he’d be dead already. He had a fast car and a penchant for racing it drunk, as a hobby. It’d be easier, quicker, to die by fiery vehicular collision than by dream monsters.

Ronan doesn’t sleep well to begin with, so the magic of Dream Things is inconsistent at most—and probably for the best, since Ronan has as much control over the Dream Things as he does his anything else in his life. Which is to say, he has no control over them at all.

After the thrill of a re-ignited spark for Glendower’s hunt and the surge of inexplicable magic wore off, Ronan Lynch and his friends were supposed to still act like teenagers in the daylight, which felt unfair. But they did it. Ronan mostly did it to keep Declan off his back. More than one conversation a week about staying in school was not good for the repeated promise that he really didn’t want to die.

There is a Latin test coming up, and despite being the only one needing to study, Gansey manages to get all his beloved collectibles under one roof. Monmouth, while being berated by an angry rainstorm, houses more scattered notecards and crumpled energy drink cans than it has before. It is practically bursting at the seams with teenagers.

It doesn’t take long for Ronan to lose interest, other than the rare moments that Adam makes a mistake, and Ronan gets to smirk at him. He’s poking bread into Chainsaw’s beak when Noah yawns and floats to bed. It is the first time any of the Aglionby boys realize the time.

Adam’s eyes go wider than saucers, and he shoots up so suddenly from the couch that Chainsaw squawks and flusters her wings at him. Black feathers join the mess on the floor.

“Shit, shit, shit.” Adam becomes a blur of motion as he simultaneously stuffs his feet into his shoes and his books into his backpack. His anxiety is palpable, a living thing in Monmouth, that circles Ronan and Gansey’s throats like a noose. They share a glance and a thought, but neither of them speaks it. “ _Shit_.”

Ronan cannot even come up with a snarky comment. “Do you need a ride?”

Adam will not make it out to the trailer park on his bike, not in the storm, not in the dark.

Adam glances from the rain-spattered window to the trash around his feet to Ronan to Gansey to the ceiling. It is as though every thought he has is coming out at once and not at all. His mouth opens and closes like the tight grip he has on his beaten up denim jacket. “Yeah. Yeah. I think I need a ride.”

It must be bad, for Adam Parrish to ask for help, so both Gansey and Ronan spring into action.

Adam’s belongings are stuffed into backpacks and waiting arms. Gansey is forcing umbrellas from the stand by the door. Ronan’s keys jangle loudly as they sprint through the gravel lot. They deposit themselves into seats and shoot off towards the mountains and away from safety.

For a grim moment, Ronan realizes that it’s almost as bone-chilling as the magic.

\-------

It is Gansey who breaks the silence because of course it is. He sounds like another person when he speaks, unsure of himself, frightened, and childlike. “Is it going to be all right, Parrish?” he asks.

Adam swallows. “Yeah.”

Ronan does not resist the urge to roll his eyes.

“You know you’re welcome to stay at Monmouth tonight if you want—”

“I know.”

Rain splatter and engine rumbling. Uneven breathing fogs up the windows. Ronan squints in the darkness for the barely-noticeable-in-the-daylight sign that signals the turn into Adam’s neighborhood. The chill of the Virginian night mixes with the warmth of the rain; a fine mist cuts Ronan’s vision of the road.

“Is there anything we can do?” Gansey sounds defeated and hopeful at once.

Adam shakes his head. Ronan resists the urge to look in his rearview mirror. He does not want to see the face of a man heading into an unknowable nightmare.

The problem is that it could be nothing, and it could be everything. Adam does not know, and he is doubtful that Robert even knows until he starts swinging his fists.

The car finally rolls to a stop at the top of the road. The sight of the BMW might rocket Robert into a tirade about wealthy kids and showing off. (Ronan knows where Adam gets his class prejudices.) Gansey wordlessly hands off an umbrella, his hope being that Adam being dry instead of drenched might get him out of trouble. It just might. It probably won’t.

“We’re coming to get you in the morning,” Gansey says. Ronan knew this before Gansey even brought it up. “Your bike is at Monmouth anyway.”

The pallor of Adam’s skin gives way to a flush of pink. Ronan looks pointedly away, fiddles with the knobs of the radio. The echoes of their last fight on the topic fills his head:

because it’s _embarrassing_

Ronan’s blood boils, knowing that Adam thinks there is any sort of correlation between himself and the abuse, other than being a victim of it. That he thinks Robert’s treatment of him has everything to do with his own personal failings than it does the fact that some people should never have children. Adam Parrish thinks that his abuse is cause-and-effect, the consequences of his actions. Ronan wonders if Robert thinks twice about any of it.

“Yeah, I’ll see you guys tomorrow.” Adam awkwardly stretches out of the car with the umbrella stretched overhead. The door closes so quietly Ronan doesn’t know it is closed until he checks to see if Adam is actually gone.

A glance at Gansey reveals a portrait of regret. Ronan drives off.

\-------

“This is _bullshit_!”

Ronan almost runs off the road from the suddenness of it, and Gansey’s use of a swear word.

“It’s bullshit, Ronan,” he repeats. “Adam doesn’t deserve this shit.” Ronan has nothing to add. That is what it comes down to, isn’t it? Adam Parrish doesn’t deserve this shit. “I don’t get it. Adam is a smart guy. He should know that he doesn’t have to take this lying down!”

“It’s not like he’s rolling on his back and asking for it.” Ronan only knows to say this because he’s already accused Adam of passive acceptance of his abuse and has been thoroughly put into his place about it.

“No, I know, I know,” Gansey sighs. He pinches the bridge of his nose. “I know.” Though Gansey talks like a man thirty years over his age, though he holds wisdom that no teenager should have, he is just as lost for answers as Ronan. It would almost be comforting, if it didn’t mean that both of them just had to stare up the road with their thumbs up their asses. “Helen told me her college roommate was in a relationship like this. And after Helen finally convinced her to dump the guy, she went back to him anyway. And then I did some research—” Of course he did. Gansey’s weapon of choice was always knowledge, where Ronan’s was always fists. “Did you know that on average, it takes someone _seven times_ to leave an abuser for good?” Of course Ronan does not know that. “Lynch, I don’t think I could watch him go back.”

Knowing he’d rather tie Adam up in a dark cellar than watch him crawl back to the trailer park, Ronan nods.

“And everything I read, it talked about how taking someone out of the situation is violating their autonomy,” Gansey continues, a steady stream of consciousness, unable to turn off his fount of knowledge once he starts. Ronan knows Gansey well enough to know that he has been sitting on this information for too long. “It’s just that… I can’t imagine Adam _wanting_ to stay, you know? And he’s smart enough to know how to get out. So, why won’t he?”

Ronan has run these very questions through every simulator imaginable and has only come up empty.

After a considerable silence, Gansey asks, “What does he know that we don’t?”

\-------

The worst part is not knowing.

Adam considers sleeping on the porch or in the cab of his father’s car, rather than sneaking inside, but since the odds are about fifty percent that he’s safe to go in, the odds are also fifty percent that delaying his return home will make everything worse.

Adam’s a terrible gambler.

He toes his shoes off outside, leaves them mud-caked, soaked, and floppy by the front door. The hinges on the screen door are rusty and full of gossip; they’ll alert the whole neighborhood if Adam isn’t careful. He manages to make it inside without a fuss but hasn’t made it past the threshold when the lights snap on, blinding him.

Robert Parrish is bare-chested and bare-footed. He is impossibly large compared to the doublewide (or maybe it just feels that way), and the look on his face is equal parts tired and pissed. “You’re home late.”

Adam freezes, like his father will not see him if he does not move.

“Where were you?”

Adam knows not answering a question is more dangerous than having the wrong one. He ducks his head when he mumbles, “Studyin’.”

“What was that?” Robert sneers.

“Studyin’,” Adam says, a bit louder. He puts on the full Henrietta accent, knowing its trained absence incenses his father.

Robert raises a well-trained brow. “So that school’s more important to you than your curfew?”

“No, sir.” _Escape_ is. And that’s what Aglionby Prep has always been, a means to escape.

“The rules in this house don’t mean shit now that you’re sucking up to some rich kids?” Robert takes a threatening step forward, which Adam meets with a reproachful step backwards.

“No, sir.”

“Then why the _hell_ are you home past midnight, Adam?” Robert growls.

“I just lost track of time—”

Robert raises his hand to strike, and Adam flinches heavily. The moment hangs suspended between them. Robert’s hand does not fall.

“Get to bed before I whoop your ass.”

Adam does not have to be told twice.

\-------

Adam scores higher than Ronan on the Latin test which surprises exactly no one, and he hops in the BMW in the morning smiling and unscathed, which surprises all the occupants of Monmouth Manufacturing.

It goes on like this for a few weeks. There are a few appearances from Ronan’s dreams and/or nightmares, a smattering of visits to a mysterious forest, and more Nino’s pizzas consumed than is healthy. Life is as normal as can be for a group of friends consisting of ghost, a dreamer, a guy who should be dead, and an Adam Parrish.

Adam falls asleep at Nino’s one night. They’re sharing a third cheese pizza when Ronan feels the heavy weight of Adam’s head on his shoulder. The three conscious boys share glances and lower their voices to whispers. The multiple part-time jobs serve the multiple-pronged purpose of getting Adam enough money to survive Aglionby, keeping him away from home long enough to stay safe, and wearing him out to the point that he can sleep, despite his racing thoughts. Ronan is almost envious of the latter.

Noah is hissing about how much he hates the new _Star Wars_ trilogy when a whimper cuts the conversation short. Adam shudders against Ronan’s leather jacket. “Uh, Parrish?” Ronan asks. Another whimper. He gives Adam’s shoulder a small shove. “Adam—”

Adam shudders to life, sucking in a breath like all the air had been vacuumed from his lungs. A sheen of sweat pricks at his temples, and his eyes twitch like a racing heartbeat from face to face around the booth.

“Letmeout.”

“Adam,” Gansey starts, sympathetically.

“Let me _out_!” Adam roars. Ronan scampers from the table, is barely upright when Adam dashes from the restaurant. The three friends blink at empty spot and each other. Gansey rises to follow.

“I’ve got it,” Ronan says, waving a hand in Gansey’s direction.

He knows a nightmare when he sees one.

He finds Adam doubled over in the alley between the pizza place and the used bookstore, breathing like he punctured a lung. Ronan stops at a distance, coughs to signify his presence. Adam’s spine stiffens, but he does not face the other man.

“You all right, Runaway Bride?” Ronan does not know why he knows this reference. Adam doesn’t respond, so Ronan continues unprompted. “You keep running away like that, people are going to think something’s wrong.”

Adam breathes.

Ronan does not.

“Name five things you can see.”

Adam’s brow knits as he raises his head.

“Just do it, Parrish.”

Adam considers his surroundings. “Uh, a water bottle. A… brick wall? Your stupid boots.” A beat, some uneven breathing. “The dumpster. That piece of weird trash.”

“Four things you can touch.”

Adam slowly runs down a list.

Ronan asks for three things he can hear, two he can smell, one he can taste. Adam complies each time. After another measured beat of silence, he stands upright and sighs.

“Thanks.”

“I had a lot of panic attacks after my dad died.” Which were less about the Dad-Being-Dead thing and more about the Finding-the-Dead-Dad thing, but both things contributed. “Declan made me do a bunch of therapy so he wouldn’t have to chuck me in a loony bin.”

They do not talk much about Niall Lynch and his tragic demise. Mostly because Ronan doesn’t want to and also because it might come off as bragging, having a dead dad and all, given Adam’s circumstances.

Or mostly because Ronan is a coward and emotionally constipated in a way that no philosophical or psychological fiber supplements could help.

“Thank God you aren’t the Dreamer,” Ronan says. He picks at a string on one of his bracelets. “I don’t want to know what shit you’d be bringing back to Nino’s.” Though his most educated guess says it would be Robert-Parrish-shaped.

“Go back inside, Ronan,” Adam says. “I’ll be right there.”

“Nah, you ruined the mood,” Ronan shrugs. “The whole romantic atmosphere is dead.” It is clear that Adam will not further the conversation, so Ronan continues. “You’ve got cheese on your face.”

Adam furiously wipes at the corners of his lips. “Does it make me look hot?” he asks.

“Makes you look like you ate out the Little Caesar’s mascot.”

Adam makes a face. “Ew.”

They go back inside.


	8. Chapter 8

The illusion is broken on a Wednesday, when Ronan notices Adam gripping onto his desk in Latin class like he is in trouble of floating into space if he lets go. 

Ronan bares his teeth at Tad Carruthers who attempts to snatch Adam as a partner for whatever stupid worksheet the teacher has thrown at them. He slides into the desk beside his friend who sways like there is an ocean under his feet, eyelids fluttered closed.

“Earth to Parrish,” Ronan says, snapping his fingers in front of Adam’s face.

Adam jumps. When he opens his eyes, they do not focus anywhere— not on Ronan’s face, not on the board, not on the worksheet. 

“Man, what’s up with you?” Ronan asks. “You pull a double at Boyd’s last night or something?” Exhaustion has made Adam Parrish do and say funny things. Not Ha Ha Funny but like Pulling-a-Raven-Out-of-Your-Dream-and-Naming-Her-Chainsaw Funny. Strange, unexpected, but makes sense in whatever loose concept of reality the friend group was currently circling.

Adam blinks, slowly, slowly. “Uh, yeah. At Boyd’s.” 

He unceremoniously puts his forehead down on the desk. Ronan fills out the worksheet in chicken scrawl. He signs Adam’s name to it. The bell rings, and he nudges Adam awake.

“You’ve got PolySci or something,” he says, when Adam blinks up at him. Agonizing moments later, Adam follows Ronan out the door. They’re halfway across the Quad when Ronan turns and realizes that Adam is yards away and ducked behind a bush, puking. Ronan swears and jogs over.

“What the fuck?” he asks, because honestly what the fuck.

Adam retches again and straightens to his full height. He wobbles, pink cheeked, like a toddler sleep-drunk on naptime.

“I’m…” His voice trails off, his jaw sets in determination, and Adam starts towards one of the vine-crawling school buildings. 

“Where are you going?” Ronan asks, grabbing Adam by the sleeve of his sweater. “What the hell is going on with you, Parrish?” 

His eyes narrow. There it is. Welt-shaped bruises, four on one side of Adam’s neck, one on the other side. Adam’s gaze looks up, down, at Ronan’s head, at Ronan’s shirt, then glazes over Ronan’s shoulder. Ronan gently cups his hand behind Adam’s head, at the base of his skull, and feels a hard knot there.

“Parrish, are you concussed?” 

“I’ve got Latin,” Adam grumbles.

“We just came from Latin,” Ronan growls. He uses one hand to keep a steady hold on the front of Adam’s shirt and the other to dig his cell phone from deep within his backpack. He presses one of the five contacts he has in his phone. “Gansey, I’m taking Parrish to Monmouth. Just, uh, take notes for him in PolySci.” Adam makes a noise of complaint, but Ronan shushes him. “Find someone who has calc with him and get the homework or something. I don’t fucking know.” He hangs up.

Adam is pliant as he is lead to the BMW in the parking lot. Ronan has to buckle his seatbelt for him. 

“’M all right,” he murmurs, eyes closed.

Ronan swears, turns down the blaring of “Murder Squash”, and manhandles Adam into Monmouth Manufacturing like corralling a drunken college student back into their dorm. Adam barely makes it to the couch before he collapses into it. Ronan takes great care to arrange all of the boy’s limbs onto the cushions.

“What are we doing here?” Adam asks. Ronan slides his dusty shoes off, tosses them to the floor in a heap. 

“I wish I knew,” Ronan answers. He plops in an armchair and thinks like Gansey, scouring WebMD for information re: concussions and how not to kill someone with one. Adam gently snores before Ronan has a chance to panic. The internet says something about 8-10 hours of sleep, but Ronan doubts Adam has seen that many hours of rest since his time in the womb. An hour passes, and then Ronan reads on some sketchy website that letting people with concussions sleep could be dangerous, so he jostles Adam awake. “Parrish, you dead?” he asks.

Adam grumbles and swats at Ronan’s hands, but he is pushing himself into a sitting position. Ronan sighs.

“What time is it?” Adam asks, eyes barely slits. “Why am I at Monmouth?” 

“You puked in the bushes at school,” Ronan says lamely. There is something that connects Point A to Point C, but he doesn’t know how to say it, so he says, “So… Monmouth.”

Adam tries to puzzle the pieces together, which would be difficult even without the concussion. He stares blankly. “What?” 

“Did you hit your head?” Ronan blurts. “I think you’re concussed.” 

Adam touches his skull, where Ronan felt the lump, and folds his slender hands into his lap. “Yeah, I guess I did.” 

“How?” 

Adam merely closes his eyes again. He blanches as he shifts in his seat and settles deeper into the cushions. He oomphs in pain and surprise when Ronan pokes him in the ribs. 

“Don’t go to sleep, or you’ll die.” 

“Is that a threat or a promise?” 

“Parrish, can you fuck off for a second?” Ronan snaps. “I really think something is wrong with you.”

Adam sighs that sigh. “I don’t know what you want me to say. I hit my head. I might be a little concussed. Concussions heal on their own after a while.” 

Ronan looks skeptical and glances at his phone, wondering if that cursed little box lied to him. “But you need to, like, relax and shit.” 

“No, I think you need to relax and shit, and I—” Adam heaves himself into a sitting position and braces himself as the room spins. “—have to get to the factory”

“You can’t go to work.”

“Yes, Ronan, I can go to work, and I’m going to,” Adam says simply, “because some of us have jobs that aren’t just being a professional pain-in-the-ass.”

“Dude, you puked in the bushes. You almost let Tad Carruthers be your partner in Latin. I don’t think you’re in any position to be working manual labor at a factory.” Adam is searching for his discarded shoes. “Listen, I’ll drive you there myself, if you answer one question.” He squares up and looks Adam dead in the eye. Ronan watches his vision twitch and glaze with the effort of focusing. “Quid tibi accessit?”

Adam’s foggy brain looks at the question from eleven different angles. When he realizes he cannot grab onto any conjugations or translations, he merely says, “I puked in the bushes, huh?”

“Twice.”

Adam sighs, and if he is being honest (though he often is not), even his pride does not want him to go into work. If he is being honest, he knows that he is not going to be able to get his ass off the couch without a considerable amount of support— both emotional and physical. 

“It’s been a while,” he sighs. He sinks into the couch again, folds into it. He closes his eyes, and it is equal parts to avoid Ronan’s gaze and because the world spins in his field of vision. “Do you want to yell at me about it now?”

Ronan sighs right back at him. “To be perfectly fucking honest, Parrish, no, I don’t. I don’t ever want to have this conversation again.”

“Some day I’ll be out of here,” Adam says, peacefully. A smile turns the corners of his lips. “Some day, Henrietta’s just gonna be a bad memory.”

“That’s fucking rude,” Ronan says.

“Yup, Lynch,” Adam murmurs wistfully. “I’ve been breaking my back for years to get into Harvard and leave you and your shitty music in my rearview mirror.”

Ronan would laugh if it didn’t tug at some string deep in his heart.

Adam considers his surroundings a moment and says, “I’ll miss Nino’s though.”  



	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> trigger warning: graphic description of an injury caused by abus

Adam Parrish is both the worst and the best thing that has ever happened to Ronan Lynch, not that he’d admit it.

And it’s annoying because shouldn’t _magic_ take the cake? Shouldn’t it be the fact that Ronan is both cursed and blessed with the ability to take things from a dream realm? Magic is— well, it’s _magic_ , and Adam Parrish is just a boy.

Except there is a point in time that Adam isn’t _just_ anything to Ronan. Maybe that should make him happy, since he’d all but given up on himself ever scrounging up an ounce of romantic love from within his dark heart, but instead it makes him mad. Because Adam Parrish is singularly one of the most annoying people on planet earth. Seriously, Ronan couldn’t dream up something more obnoxious.

Deep down, Ronan knows he’s not really annoyed— just scared. Constantly worried that the next time he sees his friend might be the last, that he’d lose Adam in spirit before he’d lose him physically, because there are days that the light behind his eyes just isn’t the same. And Ronan gets it, he does, how hard it is to perform normalcy when it feels like the sky is falling around you. But he cannot help but to imagine the devastation he would feel if Adam Parrish never smiled at him again.

So Ronan does everything in his power to bring that soft smirk out of him. Between romps in Cabeswater and study sessions and shifts at places of employment, Ronan manages to drive Adam through the countryside. He pushes him through a parking lot in a grocery cart. He sets up a DVD player in Monmouth and “finds” a copy of _The Iron Giant_ , which Adam claims is a childhood favorite even though he falls asleep ten minutes in.

Their fingers brush on the middle console of the BMW. Ronan does not know if he dreams the smile on Adam’s face because it is not there at a second glance. He does not try it again, but the car rides get a little longer, and Adam does not complain.

When Adam goes a long weekend without any communication, it leaves the tenants at Monmouth Manufacturing sick to their stomachs. When they return to school, Gansey, Ronan, and Noah convince Adam to buy a burner phone. (They know better than to offer to buy it themselves.) He agrees because sometimes it is easier to eat bricks than to argue with his friends. It’s a flip phone with thirty pre-paid minutes. Adam has to use T9 to text, and there is a 10-cent charge for every word, but even he figures it is a good failsafe for an emergency.

They bought it with Ronan’s credit card, which Adam then eventually traded for cash. Ronan was so delighted that Adam was even agreeing to the plan that he gladly took the money and used it to pay the sassy Nino’s waitress a stupidly large tip.

Gansey saves all their contacts into the phone under the various places of Adam’s employment. At Monmouth, they come up with a plan, should Adam ever call them.

“I did some reading,” Gansey says. “It’s safest for us to answer Adam’s calls like we work with him. Like I can pretend to be a foreman at the factory. You can pretend you’re a secretary at Boyd’s.” Ronan almost makes a comment about feeling like he is in a spy movie, but the idea that this is Adam’s reality instead of a Hollywood film makes him sober up. “You know, just in case his dad gets a hold of the phone or something.”

“I don’t know if I can do it,” Noah says, voice almost a whisper.

“Well, let’s just hope that it doesn’t come to this,” Gansey says solemnly.

Ronan starts to keep his phone on him at all times.

His first phone call is only a week later.

His throat is dry when he answers. “Boyd’s. This is… Allen speaking.” But it’s well past closing hours for the shop, and Robert Parrish knows all the workers, and Ronan should have thought of an excuse way before now. But he barely has a moment to ruminate on his own stupidity when Adam’s voice crackles through the speaker.

“Ronan, I need you.”

\-------

Ronan pushes the BMW to speeds it has never seen. If it were not for Gansey’s white knuckles and constant shouts of surprise, Ronan might climb into triple digits. Besides sharing monosyllables of Adam’s communication to Gansey, the two boys do not speak as they rocket towards the trailer park. The engine’s growl parts the cold night air of Henrietta.

“Should you turn off your lights?” Gansey, ever practical, asks. The last thing Adam needs is the BMW attracting attention, a crowd, but Ronan shakes his head.

“How the hell am I gonna find him with the lights off?” he growls.

Adam called from outside of the trailer, said he had left and started towards the main road. Ronan told him to stick to the tree line and use the darkness for cover, to only come out when the BMW flashes its brights twice. He’d rather have a crowd than risk Robert Parrish finding his son mid-escape.

Unanswered questions remain bit behind clenched teeth.

He rolls to a stop at the predetermined destination. He’s about to flash his lights when a movement catches his eye. “ _Fuck_ ,” he swears. He unclips his seatbelt and launches himself from the car before Gansey’s mouth is open. He stumbles on the gravel, kicks dust clouds in his haste, and kneels before the figure crumpled in the tall grass. Gansey is yards behind him, voice strangled as he whimpers, “Adam?”

“Parrish,” Ronan struggles to keep his voice low. “Jesus Christ, Parrish.”

“‘M all right,” Adam mumbles, and Ronan believes him if they are operating under the definition of _all right_ being somewhere between terrible and really terrible. Adam yelps as Ronan snakes an arm under his shoulders. “Careful. Shit.” Ronan registers the skin there feeling like fire.

“Ronan,” Gansey says.

“Let’s get you up,” Ronan mutters, attempting to shift Adam’s weight to his feet.

“Ronan.”

“We’ll get you in the car and figure out what to do next.” Ronan’s voice is braver and calmer than he feels.

“ _Ronan_.”

“ _What_ , Gansey?” Ronan snaps ferociously. He follows Gansey’s gaze, sweat like ice down his spine, until he realizes some of the warmth on his skin is wet. In the partial glow of his headlights and the whitewash of the moon, Ronan sees the back of Adam’s shirt in ribbons, dark splotches blooming, blooming, blooming.

In the bewildered, horrified silence, Adam hangs his head.

It’s a careful dance, getting Adam to wobbly feet and laying him gently into the backseat of the BMW. Ronan tries to find the balance between driving carefully and like a madman, wanting to put as much distance as quickly as possible between himself and Robert Parrish. His fists ache with the desire to crush the man’s face in.

“Should we go to the hospital?” Gansey asks quietly.

“No,” Adam insists from the back. “No, we can’t.”

“No offense, Adam, but no one’s asking you,” Ronan snaps.

“I can’t afford it, Lynch,” Adam says. “Besides, any pills they give me, my mom’s just gonna steal anyway.”

“Ronan,” Gansey says. Their eyes meet briefly, and Ronan remembers conversations about autonomy and not taking it away, not adding onto the loss of control that Robert Parrish has already inflicted on his son’s life. But Ronan wants to smash whatever internet site told Gansey this information because he doesn’t care what is _right_ ; he just wants Adam’s pain to stop.

“Take me to Monmouth,” Adam begs. “Please.”

Silence passes. “Fine,” Ronan agrees begrudgingly, “fine, but if you pass out or…”

“That’s fine,” Adam agrees. “That’s fine.”

\-------

When they burst through the doors of Monmouth, Noah ghosts from his room, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “What’s going on?” he asks.

“Where the hell were you, Czerny?” Ronan snaps. They had checked Noah’s room before they left, but it had been empty. “Never mind. I don’t fucking care.”

“Go get the first aid kit, will you, Noah?” Gansey asks kindly. Noah disappears into the bathroom while Gansey and Ronan maneuver Adam to the couch. They lay him carefully on his stomach, though Adam hisses and moans the whole way, and when Ronan flicks on the overhead light, both boys swear loudly.

What they saw in the dark on the side of the road is uglier in the light. The faded Coca-Cola tee shirt sports a couple of broad rips from which crimson stains seep into the fabric. Adam breathes deeply, and through the gaps in the shirt, Ronan watches blood spill out of a nick in the skin.

When Noah returns with the first aid kit, Gansey dumps its contents onto the coffee table. They consider Adam for a moment who goes to a great effort to make no sound. Ronan grabs a pair of blunt scissors and slices the shirt down the middle. He goes outside of himself when he pushes away the fabric to reveal the damage. Angry red welts crisscross the pale expanse of Adam’s back. Some are swollen bruises, thin and sharp, but the places where the tee shirt tore are bloody slices in the skin.

Noah takes one look and runs off to his bedroom, his soft heart shattered. Gansey looks away, all color drained from his face. Ronan stares blankly, not quite seeing, and it is not even him who reaches for the half-empty bottle of antiseptic and the cotton pads. Some ghost much braver and stronger than him possesses his limbs, and he makes quick work of cleaning the mess. Adam hisses and groans, Gansey mutters words of encouragement, and Ronan sprays, wipes, patches. A pile of bloodied cotton swabs grows on the coffee table. Adam’s fingers tangle with Gansey’s and squeeze.

The whole process takes less than ten minutes, but Ronan emerges feeling like he’s finished a twenty-hour surgery. He collapses at Adam’s feet while Gansey sits on the floor by the man’s head. No one says anything for a while until Adam does. “I’m gonna sit up,” he mumbles, Virginian accent tinged with something resembling guilt. Ronan’s insides twist.

Gansey helps lever Adam into a sitting position and peels the ruined Coca-Cola shirt off. Ronan looks away. In the dozens of daydreams he has had about seeing Adam Parrish shirtless, none were so gruesome as this.

“I’m sorry,” Adam finally says, and then he sobs. Ronan and Gansey are frozen to their spots, watching an unbreakable monument crumble. Adam’s long fingers wipe at his tear-striped cheeks. His shoulders shake. “I’m so sorry.”

“Adam, you don’t need to apologize.” Gansey is the one to speak up. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“No, I… this is too much,” Adam stutters. “I shouldn’t have asked you to do this.”

_You’re damn right_ , Ronan wants to say. _You’re damn right, you shouldn’t have asked us to do this_. From the secret keeping to this moment, Adam Parrish has asked a lot of his friends, and Ronan does not think that an apology is too much to ask for. Perhaps under better circumstances, but it does not feel like there ever will be any of those.

“We’re glad you called us,” Gansey answers, thankfully, for them both. “We told you we want to help.”

“I don’t know what happened,” Adam says, and his voice cracks with another sob. “He hasn’t… it hasn’t been this bad in so long. He hasn’t belted us in years.” Ronan gets up from the couch, walks to the large window and looks down to the parking lot. He notices blood smeared on his hands and wipes it on his shirt. “He found my college applications. It was stupid. I was so stupid. I—”

“This is not your fault.” Ronan is glad that Gansey is here to say all the right things. He does not know what will come out of his own mouth if he tries to speak. “There is nothing that you could do or say to deserve this. You know that right?”

Adam’s silence might be an answer.

“Adam, look at me.”

Ronan realizes the last time he had this much blood on his hands was when he held his father’s body in the driveway.

“Your dad is sick. Your dad is really, _really_ sick, and he needs help. But none of this has anything to do with you.”

The blood had been impossible to get out of the concrete. Declan had it torn up and more laid down. Ronan wonders if he’ll have to toss this shirt.

“Please believe me,” Gansey begs. “Don’t let him convince you that he’s not responsible. Don’t let him convince you that you aren’t worth more than this.” Gansey’s voice holds tears that won’t flow over. “You have a lot of people who care about you, Adam. We want better for you. That’s why we’re here.”

While Adam cries, Ronan imagines Gansey holding him, careful and firm. Ronan imagines Adam’s cornflower blue eyes shining, his bony hands trembling, each of those red welts screaming. Images of Adam’s back and Niall’s lifeless face swim in Ronan’s mind. He rubs at his eyes, counts backwards from twenty, from one hundred. Counts five things he can see. Four things he can touch…

He does not know how much time has passed when he hears a Henrietta accent calling for him. “Ronan? Are you okay?”

When Ronan turns around, Adam is wearing one of Gansey’s Aglionby crew shirts.

“Fuck off, Parrish.”

“Ronan—!” Gansey snaps.

“No, Gansey, fuck you too,” Ronan says. “I’m not going to sit here and play this game. I’m not going to pretend that this is fine, that I’m fine, that you’re fine. _None_ of this is fine. This is bullshit, and it’s bullshit that you’re asking us to do this!”

The silence amongst them is thick and living.

“You can protect him all you want, Adam, but I’m sure as hell not going to do it anymore.” Ronan feels something cruel and angry curling in his chest. “You don’t even know what you’re asking us to do! You don’t even _care_. I’m sick and tired of watching him hurt you. Fuck your pride. Fuck your autonomy. Fuck everything.”

He starts to stomp off towards the exit, ready to slam the door mightily.

“What are you going to do?” Adam’s voice is so tired and small, and it just enrages Ronan even more.

“I don’t know yet,” he replies. “I’m… I’m going for a fucking drive.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> trigger warning: discussion of wounds that are the result of abuse
> 
> thank you all for the kudos and comments and views! i haven't written in a long while, and it really makes it worth the hard work to know that people are reading! enjoy this painful ramble i've just written you.

Ronan does not drive far before his rage blinds him. He pulls over on the side of the road and pounds his fists on the steering wheel, a few punches on the horn for good measure.

The darkness in the windshield flashes with Niall’s face, Adam’s back, Niall’s blood, maybe Adam’s, maybe Ronan’s. Ronan grips the sides of his skull like it is in danger of exploding outwards.

Every swear word he knows and a few he possibly made up explode from his lips, punctuated by a few more choice punches to the steering wheel, and Ronan feels every muscle in his body go limp, lose its fight, and he slouches in his seat. The bass from the radio trembles around him, and it takes all the energy he has left to not start kicking at the speakers.

He will not tell anyone. He will not tell anyone because Adam asked him not to, and if Adam Parrish asked him to jump off a cliff, Ronan would probably ask which one.

Ronan knows that his lashing out was inappropriate and misplaced. But while Ronan might not be one of Robert Parrish’s firsthand victims, Ronan feels victimized by _something_. By circumstance, by secrecy, by stress and pity and guilt and fear. Ronan is the last person in the world to ask for help, but he looks at Adam Parrish every single day and wonders, where the hell are all the adults?

Because Ronan acts tough and scary, but not so far under the surface is a terrified teenager. He knows he is not the only one, that the mask of placidity Gansey wears is a well-practiced act too. They are supposed to be figuring out algebra and acne and girl problems (well…); the adults were supposed to handle the hard stuff. It is one of those moments where Ronan realizes how big of a hole Niall and Aurora left when they were gone. They would have had the answer or at the least would have assured Ronan that this burden was not his alone to carry.

Does no one in the world besides Ronan and Gansey think Adam Parrish is worth saving?

That simply cannot be right. Ronan is the Henrietta’s biggest cynic, but even he refuses to believe that the world could be that cruel. Adam Parrish is worth saving.

Adam Parrish is worth far more than saving. He is worth loving.

Fuck, Ronan Lynch is in deep.

\-------

When Ronan makes it back to Monmouth Manufacturing, the clock reads well past two in the morning, and even Chainsaw is sleeping in the doorway, her head tucked beneath her wing. She flutters as Ronan enters but stays perched, a pathetic facsimile of a watchdog.

“I called you ten times,” Gansey says. Ronan jumps in surprise, has his hand clasped around a half-full mug to hurl in the direction of the voice. “What’s the point of having one if you don’t answer it when people call?”

Ronan simply steps over the cold puddle of coffee he has left on the floor and collapses onto the couch. Every trace of Adam has been scrubbed from the room— no blood, no first aid kit, no tattered shirt, no Adam. Ronan hates that he breathes a sigh of relief.

“You owe him an apology,” Gansey says plainly. “You know that.”

Ronan does.

“I’m not saying that I don’t understand where you were coming from, because I do,” Gansey continues. He pinches the bridge of his nose underneath his glasses and then loops around the couch to sit beside Ronan. “I just think there were far more diplomatic ways to say it. And probably better times.” Ronan’s silence does little to deter Gansey from speaking, as it never has. “I hate this as much as you do, Ronan. I do. I know that I’m probably coming off as flippant, but I’m not. It’s… it’s killing me. I can’t sleep—”

“I’m shocked.”

“I can’t eat. I can’t even distract myself with Glendower without picturing what could be happening in that trailer.” Ronan notices the lines that crease at the corners of Gansey’s eyes, the way that the light glints off his glasses, the sag in his shoulders, the wrinkles in his top. He notices a very un-Gansey Gansey beside him and realizes that being wrapped up in Adam Parrish can give Ronan a bit of tunnel vision. “I’ve gone over this a million times in my head. I’ve read a million articles. I’ve thought of every scenario. I can’t think of one that ends well for Adam.”

Ronan growls, “Anything is better than going back to that animal.”

“Is it, though?” Gansey asks, and the gentleness in his voice, the genuine curiosity makes Ronan’s resolve melt. He sinks deeper into the cushions, like he is trying to meld with them, to disappear into the cracked leather. “Really, Ronan, there’s two ways this could unfold: we get the police involved, and they place Adam in foster care. _Or_ we get the police involved, and they do nothing.”

Ronan forces himself to think about anything— magic, Care Bears, Adam’s blood on his hands— before he considers what Robert Parrish would do to Adam if he found out that he had been reported to the authorities.

“And let's say that the police _do_ intervene, which is a pretty big _if_ considering our current system: _t_ he court proceedings are time consuming and costly. Adam would have to miss a lot of school, a lot of work, and… he’d lose Aglionby. And I know it’s hard for you to fathom, Ronan, but if Adam lost Aglionby, he’d lose everything.”

Ronan puzzles out the trickle effect of Robert Parrish’s abuse in real time. Adam out of work is out of tuition money. Adam out of Aglionby is out of a chance at college. Adam out of a chance at college means he cannot escape Henrietta.

There are more ways to hurt someone than physically.

There is a way that pouring money into the situation is a solution, one where Noah and Gansey and Ronan tap into their bottomless bank accounts and pay for the lawyers and the tuition. But not only would Adam never allowed a dime of their money to solve his problems, Ronan knows that there is a way that the money _does_ pay for those things, and the court case still doesn’t go in Adam’s favor. Then it all means nothing.

Is doing nothing the solution, though? Is waiting for the next phone call with a first aid kit on hand really how they will spend the next years of their lives? Ronan wants to believe that he can come up with an answer— at the least, dream one up— but nothing comes to him more helpful than _AdamInTroubleAdamNeedsHelp. AdamAdamAdam_.

“I gave him some ibuprofen and put him in my room,” Gansey’s voice breaks through Ronan’s useless thought-string. “Hopefully he drifted off a while ago. But we’ll need to wake him up.”

“Just let the guy sleep, Gansey,” Ronan says. The poorly structured couch cushions sink between them. Gansey and Ronan bump hips, elbows, slotted side-by-side. “Don’t be jealous.”

“We’ve got to get him back home before morning, Ronan,” Gansey sighs. Ronan’s heart stutters, though this was always the inevitability, wasn’t it? That Adam would have to go back. “Robert can’t know he was out all night.”

Ronan wants to argue, but some mixture of defeat and exhaustion stop him. While Gansey goes to rouse Adam, Ronan rattles through the fridge. There’s a flat, half-drunk _Monster Energy_ that he chugs despite it tasting like old coins and jet fuel.

If Adam goes back to the trailer park, so does Ronan.

\-------

Adam curls up awkwardly in the backseat. The first few bumps in the road cause him to yelp out in pain. Ronan drives safer, smoother, though there is no avoiding the jostle of gravel under the tires as they inch towards Antiem Road.

Gansey had insisted on delivering Adam back home, but when he reached for the keys to the Pig, Ronan had said, “Hey, Gansey,” and looked the other boy dead in the eye as he cracked open another _Monster Energy_ and chugged.

So Gansey had a fighting chance at some sleep, and Ronan did not. After Adam had been carefully arranged in the back seat of the BMW, Gansey went back into Monmouth to check on Noah.

With some grace, Ronan half-drags half-carries Adam around the back of the trailer. Adam mumbles a few times about being able to walk, and Ronan pretends not to hear while savoring the press of Adam’s pulse slung over his shoulders, knowing that despite it all, Adam is alive. The height to the window is impossibly high in their circumstance, so Ronan climbs in first and tosses out a milk crate where Adam keeps old notebooks. The step gives them just enough leverage to haul Adam, not comfortably, through the window. They crumple onto the mattress in a heap, both hissing swear words under their breath.

Ronan’s nose bumps against Adam’s as they attempt to untangle their limbs. Adam’s curls flop over his cornflower blue eyes. They are wide, and the corners crease with worry and exhaustion. Ronan’s fingers ghost up Adam’s spinal column— flash of blood fill his mind. Air slices through Adam’s teeth, but he makes no move.

Carefully, Ronan presses himself into a seated position. Adam is slow to follow, most of his weight collapsed onto Ronan’s chest. Ronan wriggles; Adam is slotted between his legs, his feet hanging off the end of the mattress. (Is he a monster, for committing this touch to memory?) “Come on, Parrish, up and at ‘em,” Ronan finally grunts, gently guiding Adam completely upright.

Finally unraveled, Ronan is able to focus on his surroundings. The room is in very un-Adam-like disarray. Shredded papers pepper the floor. The blankets are in a puddle beside the mattress. The metal shelving unit is upended, its contents spilled upon the ground. The plastic-y blinds over the window are mangled. Ronan’s eyes brush over a splatter of blood on the wallpaper, and he wills his mind to go blank.

Ronan says, “You’re gonna be okay” with no punctuation because Ronan does not know if it is a question, a plea, or a statement.

Adam says, “Yeah.”

“I’m going to sleep outside your window.”

“Ronan—”

“Your blood is still soaked into my shirt, Parrish. You have no room to argue.”

The guilt bites Adam’s tongue for him. Silence stretches in the haphazard room.

“I’m sorry,” Ronan finally says, “for my freak out. I mean, I meant it, but I’m sorry that I said it that way.”

Adam nods. “You don’t have to apologize.”

“No, I do, Gansey told me to,” Ronan says, though they both know Gansey has little pull over Ronan Lynch’s apologies. “But listen, I know this is impossible. I know you’re trying to figure out how to fix an impossible situation. And I’m just… I’m not good with this kind of shit. I’m not good at lying. I’m not good at watching people I care about get hurt. I’m not good at any of it. But I’m gonna try, so that I’m not the one making this… more impossible.”

Adam considers this apology/word jumble and nods. “Thanks. For everything.”

Ronan chews on his bracelet.

“You’ve got to be gone by 5:30,” Adam says. “Dad leaves at six for his shift.”

Ronan nods and heads for the window. Adam’s calloused fingers grab his wrist. He immediately lets go, like he has been burned by the touch.

“You don’t have to sleep outside.” Ronan pretends not to the notice the way that the man’s Adam’s apple bobs in the pale column of his throat while he works out which words to pick. “There’s room on the floor if you… kick some stuff around. Shouldn’t make a difference if you’re inside or out, if you’re out early.” Ronan opens his mouth to reply. “Please, Ronan.”

He sets his jaw, nods. “You should sleep with your shirt off.”

Despite it all, Adam grins devilishly. “Oh, so _that’s_ what you’re after.”

Ronan rolls his eyes. “As much as we’d all love the world’s most disturbing strip tease, it’s better for the cuts to breathe.”

“Sure, sure,” Adam says, though he reaches with great discomfort to remove Gansey’s crew shirt. “The cuts. They’ve got to breathe.”

“Good night, Parrish.”

“Good night, Lynch.”


End file.
